Talk about being narrowminded!

[Chuck Nessa]

Thanks for getting back on track. Good points. all.

[Kevin Bresnahan]

Basically, what you are implying is that critique of Wynton is based on his race rather than his music--that is just plain ridiculous, not to mention, insulting.

That is not what I am implying. I am simply pointing out that the way this thread turned... way before I entered, BTW... had Wynton Marsalis crucified for having the opinion that white critics have it in for him. The guy can think that all he wants... it's his opinion and a bunch of guys, mostly white, can't argue with his point of view on this. He's a black man who has some white critics who don't review him favorably. He sees it as racism.

BTW, I also thought it was pretty funny that Mike posted a critique by a white musician in response to these accusations that Wynton's playing the race card so I posted that. It struck me as very funny. Ha ha funny.

Chris, you keep talking to me like I am some home boy who's never been around a black person in my life. I grew up with a best buddy who was black. He was in my wedding party. I used to party with him endlessly. I also have a best friend whose wife is black. I know what black people think and I have been in many arguments with them over race.

And Chris, one more thing for you to consider, something I've wanted to post back when you first brought up your encounter with that woman at the radio station. Have you ever considered that the reason that woman wanted to file charges against the company was because some was messing with her besides you? We're talking the 60's right? You specifically brought in some blacks to "balance" the workforce a bit? You don't think there might have been some people who were upset with that? Maybe someone on the loading dock maybe? a quick switch of shipping labels...

And before you jump all over this, let me tell you... I've seen this kind of thing many times in my life. Too often. I've nailed racist assholes for doing this. I came close to slugging a guy at work over it. It is ugly and I hate it. I do not live it though.

On top of that, if it's bad being black in a white man's world, it can be even worse for a gay/lesbian in nearly any work environment. I work with some real head cases now... people who would probably like to shoot homosexuals. Too much bigotry in this world today.

Later,

Kevin

Edited October 19, 2004 by Kevin Bresnahan

[Michael Fitzgerald]

Actually, I didn't post that quote in *response* to anything on this thread at all. I just happened to be reading today's paper and saw (yet another) feature on WM, due to the new Lincoln Center hall. I found the quote by Schuller (an OLD musician) (a CLASSICAL musician) (a BRASS player) (a FAN OF RAGTIME) - all appositives that are just as accurate as a WHITE musician - to be interesting. Why? Because what he expressed agrees with what many of those people who have been critical of WM have said in the past: he hasn't lived up to his promise.

Here's the entire article.

The Making of a Jazz Statesman

October 18, 2004

By BEN RATLIFF

As Jazz at Lincoln Center prepares for the first concert

tonight at its new digs - three theaters in the Time Warner

Center on Columbus Circle - Wynton Marsalis, its

trumpet-playing star and artistic director, is behaving

increasingly statesmanlike.

Sixteen years ago, when he fought for the organization to

be taken seriously, his forceful pronouncements about the

jazz tradition nearly split its fan base in half. Some

sided with his view that jazz had lost its core identity,

diluted by rock, funk, electronics and abstraction, and

that it needed stern corrective measures before it could

grow. Others saw Mr. Marsalis as a purist scold who wished

to write all the innovations since the mid-1960's out of

jazz's official history.

Now, with Jazz at Lincoln Center as the most powerful

nonprofit jazz institution in the world, with a

responsibility to its donors for the $128 million it took

to build the halls, his declarations, and his answers to

criticism, have become temperate and more like

coalition-building.

"John Lewis said that even to complain about what somebody

has done to you is a form of egotism," Mr. Marsalis said

recently in an interview in Manhattan, referring to the

pianist of the Modern Jazz Quartet, one of many jazz heroes

- Dizzy Gillespie, Art Blakey, Elvin Jones - who have

counseled him since he was a teenager.

He started playing gigs when he was 12 and says he has

never lost faith in himself. "Not only have I never lost

it," he said, "it's never been shaken."

These days Mr. Marsalis, who turns 43 today, enjoys a kind

of attention that has little precedent in jazz, and so does

Jazz at Lincoln Center. It has 3,500 subscriptions, which

are expected to bring in $1.5 million this season. During

Mr. Marsalis's stewardship, the nonprofit jazz institution

has gone beyond its initial goals - the creation of a canon

for jazz history and the drive to give the genre more

dignity - to make it as respected by the public as

classical music is. Now the arts complex appears to be more

focused on the expansion of jazz into other disciplines -

dance, opera, drama - and exposing jazz to the world

through its educational resources.

As a musician, an ideologue and an arts administrator, Mr.

Marsalis has created jobs and an official spot for jazz in

New York where there was none, with the cooperation of the

city, which gave $30 million to the new complex.

He may also be the most recognizable jazz musician in the

street, the only one to win a Pulitzer Prize, in 1997, and

one of the few who can easily sell out a midsize theater in

this country and abroad.

Yet as Mr. Marsalis has flourished in the realm of

plush-theater culture, luxury-goods sponsorships, official

ceremonies, television specials and books of reminiscence

and advice, his ground-level influence as a bandleader in

the jazz scene has declined.

His transformation is akin to that of a stunningly talented

ballplayer who takes a job in the team's front office.

Musicians do not talk about his work nearly as much as they

did 20 years ago. The question of whether Mr. Marsalis has

been good for jazz has become an institutional one more

than an aesthetic one.

"Jazz is not merely music," is how he put it in a recent

statement drafted for the opening of the new halls. "Jazz

is America - relationships, communication and

negotiations." When he pops up as a sideman, he becomes

news on the grapevine. In many ways he has become an entity

above and around the daily jazz world, yet not quite in it:

"a bookkeeper, keeping the history present," as the

trumpeter Leron Thomas put it.

Mr. Marsalis is competitively interested in setting an

example and plays constantly. He performed so much over the

summer, at festival dates in Europe and Canada and

after-concert jam sessions at hotels, that his lip became

inflamed. He canceled a performance in June at the Montreal

Jazz Festival, minutes before it started. "I never had

physical problems with my chops before," he said. "And I

never canceled a gig before." His doctor told him to take a

month's rest from the horn.

He had enough to keep him busy: composing a commissioned

piece, "Suite for Human Nature," with a libretto by the

lyricist Diane Charlotte Lampert, for December; rehearsing

with the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra; finishing a new

book; and editing two new records. "With my life in

general, I just keep going," he said.

"It's all one thing," he continued. "My personal body of

work is part of it. I put an extreme amount of effort into

it. After 15 or 20 years of that, it becomes you. That's

something Art Blakey told me. I was asking him how he plays

with intensity every time. He said: 'If that's the only way

you play, that's the only way you play. You become what you

do.' "

Mr. Marsalis was born in Kenner, La., in 1961 and moved

with his family to New Orleans, about 20 miles east, during

his high school years. He came from an imposing musical

family: his father, Ellis Marsalis, was a well-known jazz

pianist and educator, and three of his five brothers

eventually became professional musicians.

He came to New York in 1979 to enter Juilliard after

graduating from high school and was immediately recognized

around the jazz scene as a virtuoso. "I can't think of any

other musician at all who had that kind of buzz when he

came to town," said the trumpeter Steven Bernstein, who

arrived in New York the same week.

The buzz about Mr. Marsalis's virtuosity continued for

nearly a decade: through his tenure with Art Blakey's Jazz

Messengers, the establishment of his own quartet, his

output on Columbia Records and albums like "Black Codes

From the Underground" and "J Mood," which jazz musicians

paid close attention to in the mid-80's.

By 1988, his role in jazz began to change, as did his

music. It was the year he helped formulate a series of

concerts at Lincoln Center, then called "Classical Jazz."

In his own work he reached back further, to the blues and

Duke Ellington and the New Orleans ritual of the funeral

parade, to create longer and more complex forms. He began

playing more slowly, and his pronouncements about jazz and

culture became broader and more trenchant. He was raising

the stakes.

That year he also wrote an article for The New York Times

headlined "What Jazz Is - and Isn't." Mr. Marsalis argued

for a hierarchy of talent. He held that critics and

audiences had adopted a destructive openness that had led

to a fundamental misunderstanding of jazz. He named rock,

new-age music, pop and "third-stream" fusions of jazz and

classical as weakening agents. "There may be much that is

good in all of them," Mr. Marsalis wrote, "but they aren't

jazz." He contended that nothing new would be created

without a knowledge of what was old.

His pronouncements engendered a bitter debate about his

intentions: did Mr. Marsalis want to help the music or own

it? Did he sufficiently respect the last 40 years of jazz?

He began to rise above the conversation. "Jazz is not

fragmented," he said in a 1992 interview, at a moment when

musicians often talked bitterly about "Wynton's house" and

when the now-arcane term "downtown jazz" was code for

anything too far afield to be played at Lincoln Center.

Today, Mr. Marsalis rarely issues outright challenges, and

the concert programming of Jazz at Lincoln Center, the most

controversial part of an organization that does many

things, has broadened. He has explored the music of Cuba,

Brazil and Argentina, presenting programs that venture far

from American swing roots. In 2002 and 2004, he presented

concerts dealing with two important jazz figures of the

last 40 years that many resented him for overlooking:

Charles Mingus and Ornette Coleman.

Lately, he talks and writes about how great swaths of music

in the world are closely related, through drones,

repetition and groups of meter. "I wouldn't say that he's

mellowing," says André Ménard, the artistic director of the

Montreal Jazz Festival. "But his hard shell of

traditionalism has kind of broken open."

Mr. Marsalis's music has grown in scale and ambition over

the last decade. "Blood on the Fields," the 1997

Pulitzer-winning oratorio, was a three-hour work on

slavery; "All Rise," from 1999, for jazz band, orchestra

and choir, reflected on the end of the millennium. Both

projects were commissioned by Lincoln Center, but he is

driven by his own discipline.

He is known as a controlling bandleader. "I've known him

since I was 13, and now I'm 31," said Eric Lewis, the

pianist for the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra as well as

Mr. Marsalis's quartet. "I had to prove myself over and

over again. Of all the bands I've been in, his world was

the most strict, the most difficult to experience freedom

within. The level of technical proficiency I've had to come

to in order to disengage all of the security cameras and

laser beams and motion detectors that he's coming with -

all that has made me a very strong musician."

Though plenty of people in jazz begrudge Mr. Marsalis his

success, a few feel that he has not played to his own

strengths as a musician. In 1979, when Mr. Marsalis was 17,

Gunther Schuller, the composer and historian of classical

music and jazz, accepted Mr. Marsalis for the summer

program at Tanglewood and remained a friend and mentor for

years after. "There is no better trumpet player on the face

of this earth," Mr. Schuller said. "This guy is beyond

belief, what he can do both in classical music and in jazz,

technically. But in general I think that Wynton has not

grown, has not developed to the extent that I thought he

would, in terms of inventiveness and originality as a

player and as a composer."

"Ten years ago," Mr. Schuller continued, "I told him: 'You

know, Wynton, one of these days you've got to take the

trumpet out of your mouth. Go somewhere and think. You're

on a merry-go-round of incredible success and financial

well-being, but one of these days you should think of your

long-range development.' "

Mr. Marsalis does not see it that way. Asked if he was

shortchanging his ability to do his own thing, he reacted

strongly. "This is my own thing," he said. "I could play

solos all night if I wanted to, and I like playing fourth

trumpet in a big band, too."

Then his answer turned almost Buddhist: "There's no part of

the music or what we do that's not my thing. If it's just

sitting in the trumpet section, if it's soloing, if it's

education, if it's teaching a private lesson or talking to

a kid whose parents have waited with him after a gig, if

it's playing 'Happy Birthday' on the phone for an 8-year

old. It's all a part of my thing."

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/18/arts/mus...8cd3a1f7a82a233

---------------------------------

Mike

[Christiern]

Kevin said; "The guy can think that all he wants... it's his opinion and a bunch of guys, mostly white, can't argue with his point of view on this. He's a black man who has some white critics who don't review him favorably. He sees it as racism."

• Do you really believe that Wynton sees the criticism as racism? I don't, I think that what we have here is a defense mechanism, the same one that has the Bush people labeling criticism of his regime as unpatriotic.
  

Kevin said; "Chris, you keep talking to me like I am some home boy who's never been around a black person in my life. I grew up with a best buddy who was black. He was in my wedding party. I used to party with him endlessly. I also have a best friend whose wife is black. I know what black people think and I have been in many arguments with them over race."

• I never meant to imply that you live in a lily-white world, but I don't think having as friends a best buddy and buddy's wife who are black is going to give you a feeling for what the pervasive attitude toward Wynton is among black musicians.
  

Kevin said; "And Chris, one more thing for you to consider, something I've wanted to post back when you first brought up your encounter with that woman at the radio station. Have you ever considered that the reason that woman wanted to file charges against the company was because some was messing with her besides you? We're talking the 60's right? You specifically brought in some blacks to "balance" the workforce a bit? You don't think there might have been some people who were upset with that? Maybe someone on the loading dock maybe? a quick switch of shipping labels..."

• You obviously don't know much about the Pacifica stations. When I integrated WBAI's staff, the move was welcomed by all--stations like WBAI do not attract racists, it's as simple as that. Besides, the complaints against the eavesdropping switchboard operator came mostly from black employees.
  

Kevin said; "And before you jump all over this, let me tell you... I've seen this kind of thing many times in my life. Too often. I've nailed racist assholes for doing this. I came close to slugging a guy at work over it. It is ugly and I hate it. I do not live it though.

On top of that, if it's bad being black in a white man's world, it can be even worse for a gay/lesbian in nearly any work environment. I work with some real head cases now... people who would probably like to shoot homosexuals. Too much bigotry in this world today."

• Kevin, I don't for a minute think that you have a racist thought in your body, I just wanted to point out that your comments in this thread miss the mark. As Chuck and others have said, the jazz world is not free of bigotry, but I think instances of it are relatively rare, and it absolutely does not play a role in how Wynton is viewed.
  

[blue lake]

In his forthcoming book “Experimental Music in Black and White: The AACM in New York, 1970-1985,” George Lewis (the trombonist, etc.) is writing about “New Music and Hybridity” with a paragraph dedicated to the critical writing of John Cage (“History of Experimental Music in the United States”) and subsequent histories and reference works which deal with “pan-European high culture music.” He writes, “Musics by people of color (in particular, the high-culture musics of Asia) were most often framed as ‘sources.’”

Lewis continues, “However, the development of a notion of ‘experimental’ and ‘American’ that excludes the so-called bebop and free jazz movements, among the most influential American experimentalist musics of the latter part of the twentieth century, is highly problematic. This discursive phenomenon can be partly accounted for by the general absence of discourses on issues of race and ethnicity in criticism on American experimentalism. In later years, this aspect of denial in new music’s intellectual environment tended to separate it from both post-1960s jazz and from other contemporary work in visual art, literature, and dance. More directly, it could be said that part of white-coded experimentalism’s on-going identity formation project depended in large measure upon an Othering of its great and arguably equally influential competitor, the jazz tradition, which is also widely viewed (and views itself) as explicitly experimental. The transcribed orature of musicians endorsing the importance of exploration, discovery, and experiment is quite vast and easy to access; it spans virtually every era of jazz music, and includes nearly every improviser of canonical stature before the rise of Wynton Marsalis in the mid-1980’s. (Footnote to Arthur Taylor’s “Notes and Tones”).”

Bowie made a great point above, and Lewis confirms it. So let's listen to what Max Roach has to say about the jazz tradition, or Jackie McLean, or Ornette, while they're still alive and talking. Those are the musicians who created it in the first place and they're still here. Let's not look to our children one day with blank faces when they ask, "Why weren't people paying attention to the aesthetics of free jazz when the pioneers were still alive to help illuminate it?"

There is an entire section in Lewis' book called “In the Tradition?” which you may want to read when this book is published. BTW thanks to Mike F. for hipping us to the “Current Musicology” pulication that contains this excerpt.